Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO, Kress named interim chief

Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s president, chief executive, and board member, effective immediately, the company said in a statement on November 12, four days after he told employees he had been unfaithful to his wife.

Huang, 63, co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and led it for 33 years as it became the supplier of most of the chips used for advanced AI. He had about 60 direct reports, and the company had no chief operating officer and no clear succession plan, according to Fortune’s report on November 11.

Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress, 59, will serve as interim CEO and keep her finance role while the board searches for a permanent chief among internal and external candidates. The board also appointed Harvey Jones, 73, a director since 1993, as its first chair. It accepted Huang’s resignation on November 11, a securities filing shows.

“The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption,” Jones said in the statement, which gave no reason for Huang’s departure.

The board met on the evening of November 11, after a Wall Street Journal report that directors were preparing to oust Huang over extramarital affairs. The same day, a New York Times report, citing five people who worked at the company, said Huang had a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, who reported to him.

Nvidia shares closed down 4.34% on November 12 and another 2.01% on November 13, a loss of about 13% for the week, Yahoo Finance price data show.

The company said on November 13 that it was still selecting a search firm and that speculation about individual candidates was “premature,” according to Bloomberg’s report.

The crisis began on November 8, when Huang wrote in an email to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife and the board opened an independent investigation into reports that he had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. US officials suspect Alice Huang, an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based company that buys Nvidia chips, of working for Chinese intelligence, The New York Times reported. Her ties to Huang helped at least $7.5 billion of Nvidia chips move through Chinese companies since 2023, according to a November 10 report by The Information.

Huang has agreed to testify before Congress, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast told reporters on November 12, according to Al Jazeera’s report. Mast and two other House committee chairmen had asked Huang in a November 5 letter to brief them behind closed doors on November 18. Nvidia reports third-quarter results on November 17.